WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey and Greece: Still More Peace Talks by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on January 27th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17001/turkey-greece-peace-talks

Ankara and Athens, starting in 2002, held 60 rounds of talks before their exploratory efforts came to a halt in 2016. After a five-year-long pause the rivals agreed to resume talks on January 25, starting the 61st round.

“The idea that a strategic — so-called strategic — partner of ours would actually be in line with one of our biggest strategic competitors in Russia is not acceptable.” — Antony Blinken, President Joe Biden’s then-nominee for Secretary of State, Arab News, January 26, 2021.

“Turkey has adopted a strongly militaristic approach, making efforts toward conflict resolution increasingly unlikely.” — Dimitris Tsarouhas, a professor of international relations, a Scientific Council member of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies in Brussels, and a World Bank consultant, Arab News, January 26, 2021.

When traditional Aegean rivals, Turkey and Greece, agreed to launch “exploratory talks” to resolve their disputes, Iraq’s president was Saddam Hussein, U.S. President George W. Bush called for a regime change in Iraq, 9/11 was only months in the past, the euro had just become the official currency of 12 of the European Union’s members, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the Mars Odyssey had found signs of water ice deposits on Mars.

Ankara and Athens, starting in 2002, held 60 rounds of talks before their exploratory efforts came to a halt in 2016. After a five-year-long pause, the rivals agreed to resume talks on January 25, starting the 61st round. Rounds 61 and onward will probably be the most fragile of all peace talks for a number of reasons.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

To Hell With Unity It is not good for the country to pretend that the Left will respect your rights as Americans if you just let them have their way with the law. By Dan Gelernter

Posted By on January 27th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/26/to-hell-with-unity/

The recent betrayal by Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is a reminder that the ruling class in Washington, D.C. values nothing so highly as being the ruling class in Washington, D.C. Offer them a choice between maintaining a “good working relationship with their colleagues across the aisle” on the one hand, and democracy on the other, and they’ll stick with their colleagues: Their daily lives change little no matter who is in power. 

Their priority is that they be able to chat amicably at parties with people who just called them liars on cable TV. It’s just politics, after all. It’s just a game. They don’t feel the effects of their policies because they live in the one city in America that gets wealthier when the economy gets worse.

But ordinary people will feel the effects. Joe Biden has already rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement. He has rejoined the World Health Organization. He has suspended federal oil and gas permitting and canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. He has stopped work on the border wall, suspended deportations for 100 days, and announced his intention of a path to legalization (i.e., a path to ballooning the Democratic Party’s voter rolls) for millions of illegals in the country. He signed a mandate requiring masks on federal land. He signed a bizarre executive order forcing schools to accept biological men on women’s sports teams. He reversed Trump’s ban on Chinese involvement in the U.S. power grid. And he also reversed Trump’s order mandating lower prices for insulin and epinephrine pens. Biden will also be raising your taxes—but that takes time. Everything above is just executive action. 

Imagine how great it will be once the Democratic House and Senate start pumping out unopposed legislation. But, you know, Mitch and Lindsey will still be okay hanging out with the Democrats after work because they were able to close ranks over the issue of people being angry at them about the election. Unity is wonderful. 

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Judge Slaps Down Biden’s Deportation Freeze Katie Pavlich

Posted By on January 27th, 2021

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/01/26/judge-slaps-down-bidens-deportation-freeze-n2583742

A federal judge has slapped down President Biden’s 100 day deportation freeze for illegal aliens, ruling in favor of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sued against the measure. “A federal judge on Tuesday barred the U.S. government from enforcing a 100-day deportation moratorium that is a key immigration priority of President Joe Biden,” the Associated Press reports. “U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton issued a temporary restraining order sought by Texas, which sued on Friday against a Department of Homeland Security memo that instructed immigration agencies to pause most deportations. Tipton said the Biden administration had failed ‘to provide any concrete, reasonable justification for a 100-day pause on deportations.'”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Susan Rice and the Fact-Checker Farce Tim Graham

Posted By on January 27th, 2021

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2021/01/27/susan-rice-and-the-factchecker-farce-n2583762

The new White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, came to the briefing room on Tuesday with domestic policy adviser Susan Rice. This came two days after CNN’s Brian Stelter celebrated the “refreshing” arrival of “transparency and truth” at the briefings.

Rice is best remembered in conservative circles for spewing falsehoods on five Sunday talk shows on Sept. 16, 2012, when she was White House national security adviser: She claimed the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans was a “spontaneous reaction” to an Islamophobic YouTube video, not a terrorist attack. “Protesters” showed up with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but the attack was somehow “spontaneous.” CBS later reported Team Obama knew on Sept. 11, the day of the attack, that it was a terrorist attack.

Seeing Rice at the White House podium this week, a friend of mine suggested Rice has never been “fact-checked.” Well, that can’t be, I thought. Then I went to the PolitiFact website, which strangely had a Susan Rice page … but not a single “fact-check” of Rice, even though PolitiFact was founded in 2007 and Rice worked for then-President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017. It never put her on its tilted “Truth-O-Meter.”

It turns out PolitiFact gave then-press secretary Jay Carney a “Mostly False” rating in 2013 for saying there was no effort by Rice to “play down” the terrorism angle in interviews. But Rice evaded a rating.

As PolitiFact did for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s claims of having Cherokee ancestry, it addressed Rice’s unmasking controversy in April 2017 with an article “in context” (avoiding the Truth-O-Meter). The headline read, “In context: Did Susan Rice lie about unmasking Trump associates?” On “PBS NewsHour,” anchor Judy Woodruff asked Rice “whether Trump transition officials, including the president, may have been swept up in surveillance of foreigners at the end of the Obama administration.” Rice said, “I know nothing about this.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Normalization with Four Muslim Nations The good news – and the bad. Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on January 27th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israels-normalization-with-four-muslim-nations

As long as the Jewish state maintains the upper hand—and has the will to survive—its existential enemies will be forced to comply.

Israel recently signed agreements establishing relations with four Muslim nations: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Both good and bad news surround this development.

The bad news is bland and predictable: a permanent peace between Israel and its Muslim neighbors is, according to Islamic law, or sharia, impossible: any land that was once part of Dar al-Islam—that is, any land that was ever conquered by Muslims for any length of time—is always part of Islam and must be recovered by any means necessary—preferably jihad.

As it happens, the territory consisting of the modern state of Israel was conquered by Muslims in the year 637; from then until the creation of Israel in 1948—minus some two centuries of Crusader presence—it was part of the Muslim world.

To quote Dr. Ali al-Qaradaghi, a renowned Sharia expert and secretary-general of the International Union of Muslim Scholars: “There is a consensus among Muslims, in the past and present, that if an Islamic land is occupied, then its inhabitants must declare jihad until it is liberated from the occupiers.”

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

81 election fraud cases brought to courts, 30 active cases

Posted By on January 27th, 2021

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions has put together a comprehensive list of all of the court cases on election fraud brought forward in recent months.

The group found there have been a total of 81 cases filed in Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Jersey, Montana, Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, New Mexico, North Carolina, Iowa, Colorado, Texas, New York, Ohio and Washington D.C.

Many of those that are still active were filed in the battleground states, where county totals were decided by just a handful of votes.

The case brought by the President’s campaign against the Secretary of Pennsylvania entered it’s third round as the petitioner pushed for the state Supreme Court to consolidate and reconsider former rulings regarding the counting of thousands of ballots that were improperly cast, but counted anyway.

The Nevada Republican Central Committee v. Clark County was filed in October and called for election officials to make voter records public as vote by mail processes led to a number of issues in the days following the election. In November, a judge ruled the county must reveal the number of ballots that were flagged due to signature issues, including signatures that were missing or unmatched.

While a majority of the lawsuits were brought forth by the President and his team, pockets of voters from across the country became their own advocates, filing lawsuits against election officials and state leaders all on their own.

One such group of voters in Georgia, many of whom doubled as poll tabulators and electors, filed suit detailing numerous instances of voting irregularities. A hearing was held in early January where the petitioners had the chance to bring their concerns forward.

“It is clear from the video that the people’s business in this very important process that we all hold so dear in this democracy, called elections, a one man one vote, was conducted in secrecy, not in the open,” Bob Cheeley, attorney for the petitioner stated.

Meanwhile in Arizona, two groups, “Mi Familia Vota” and “Arizona Coalition for Change” sued Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Most Important Question About the 2020 Election Is it really a “lie” or a “conspiracy theory” to wonder about the integrity of the election? Dennis Prager

Posted By on January 27th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/most-important-question-ab

Since the day after the 2020 presidential election, I have said I am agnostic with regard to whether the election was honestly or dishonestly decided.

The primary reasons for my agnosticism are the usual ones:

The anomalies:

In 132 years, no president has received more votes in his run for reelection and lost. Yet Donald Trump received 10 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 — and lost.

Trump won 18 of the 19 counties both Democrats and Republicans regard as the “bellwether” counties that virtually always go with the outcome of presidential elections. Yet he lost.

He won four bellwether states — Florida, Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina. Yet he lost.

Republicans held onto all the House seats they were defending and gained another 13 seats. Yet, Trump lost.

Add the following to the anomalies:

Unprecedented efforts were made in some states to change election laws.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s Gifts for Illegal Aliens Welcome to the open-borders president. Joseph Klein

Posted By on January 27th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/biden-pushes-forward-his-open-border-agenda-joseph-klein/

President Joe Biden is the illegal aliens’ best friend. He is asking Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for the more than 11 million illegal aliens presently living in the United States. And to make the illegal aliens feel better about themselves, Biden is seeking a change in U.S. immigration laws to replace the phrase “illegal alien” with “noncitizen” to describe them.

Unless the Democrats eliminate the filibuster in the Senate, Biden is not likely to get his complete legislative package passed by Congress. “A mass amnesty with no safeguards and no strings attached is a nonstarter,” said Republican Senator Chuck Grassley.

However, Biden decided not to wait for Congress to act. He signed an executive order halting border wall construction. He also signed another executive order reversing the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” program for so-called asylum seekers waiting for U.S. hearings on their asylum pleas. “Remain in Mexico,” worked out with the cooperation of the Mexican government, was implemented as a practical solution to a vexing problem. It was designed as an alternative to either detaining the ostensible asylum-seekers in the United States until their amnesty applications could be heard by U.S. immigration judges or releasing them into communities across the country under the infamous “catch and release” policy of prior administrations. Biden’s executive order brings back the “catch and release” policy, endangering the safety of law-abiding Americans.

Open-borders President Joe Biden is creating through such executive orders and his pro-amnesty legislative agenda a super-strong magnet to pull many more illegal migrants into the United States.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DAVID SOLWAY: THE ASSAULT ON GREATNESS *******

Posted By on January 27th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/01/24/the-assault-on-greatness-n1407826

EXCERPT

“It is not only that we cannot see the forest for the trees; our vision is so low to the ground that we cannot see the trees for the underbrush. The contemporary intent is to attach minds of ivory to feet of clay, strong wills to weak inclinations, and sterling qualities to commonplace attributes. Greatness grates. Or in Johnathan Swift’s terms from Gulliver’s Travels, we need to shrink the Brobdingnagian down to the size of the Lilliputian.

Today, we see this species of libelous truncation carried out by the media, the political echelon and a significant portion of the electorate against Donald Trump, one of the truly great presidents in the national pantheon. Obviously, Trump did not possess the gravity of Lincoln or the folksy humor of Reagan. But presidents should be judged by their deeds.

This was a president who did not accept a salary, whose love of America was undeniable, and who strove might and main to Make America Great Again. He created a prosperous economy, brought jobs and industries back to the homeland, slashed the unemployment rate to its lowest figure in the last fifty years, lifted between 6 and 7 million people off food stamps, oversaw record stock market gains, eliminated strangling business regulations and bureaucratic overreach, gave tax relief for the middle class, cut the capital gains tax, rebuilt the military, renegotiated trade deals in America’s interests, established energy independence, imposed tariffs to protect vital industries, brought high-speed broadband infrastructure to rural America, lowered the price of vehicles, passed the Navigable Waters Protection Rule providing relief to farmers, modernized the Department of Agriculture’s biotechnology sector, brought the Space force into being as the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Services, and much much more.

The fact that Trump accomplished what he did in four short years despite the veritable barrage of political obstructions, slander, disinformation, fraudulent investigations, frivolous impeachments, media mendacity and mantic contempt—in effect, a campaign orchestrated by a rabid group of ideologues to discredit and literally belittle him—beggars belief.

Trump built towers; his enemies dug trenches.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Only Five Republicans Side with Democrats To Proceed with Impeachment Trial By Matt Margolis

Posted By on January 27th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/26/only-five-republicans-side-with-democrats-to-proceed-with-impeachment-trial-n1411862

Despite Senator Rand Paul’s point of order arguing that the impeachment trial is unconstitutional, the Senate voted 55-45 not to dismiss the impeachment trial, with five Republicans joining the Democrats. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.